Efforts to go after ‘predator zone’ wolves in the Bridger Wilderness went nowhere.
An inquiry into using aircraft to shoot wolves in federally designated wilderness in the Wind River Range fizzled after a meeting between the Bridger-Teton National Forest, cattle producers and elected officials.
Bridger-Teton Supervisor Tricia O’Connor told parties who approached the forest about aerially gunning cattle-killing wolves in the Bridger Wilderness that she was “willing to discuss” and “talk it through” in a late 2018 email. Stakeholders later met in person to discuss further, but more than a year and a half later there is no proposal on the table.
It’s a “big deal” to go after native wildlife in wilderness, a highly protected class of federal land where natural processes are prioritized, Bridger-Teton Pinedale District Ranger Rob Hoelscher told the News&Guide.
“We don’t allow gunning of anything in the wilderness without going through a [minimum requirements analysis] and a [National Environmental Policy Act] process,” Hoelscher said. “This came up and we discussed it a little bit, but we haven’t allowed it and we don’t plan to.”
Although not a public conversation, the idea of authorizing federal employees to capture and lethally target wolves using a helicopter in the Bridger Wilderness came to light through a Freedom of Information Act request. The advocacy group Western Watersheds Project filed a FOIA request that turned up the summer 2018 email thread, which was then provided to the News&Guide.
Parties to the email correspondence included Hoelscher, forest wildlife biologist Randy Griebel, Sublette County cattle rancher and state House Rep. Albert Sommers, Wyoming Wildlife Services Director Mike Foster, Sublette County Predator Board member and woolgrower Cat Urbigkit and cattle ranchers Joel and Cotton Bousman. The discourse primarily concerned scheduling an in-person meeting.
Sommers told the News&Guide that the discussion was spurred by wolves chronically killing cattle on summer grazing allotments in the southern Winds. That part of the Wind River Range is outside of the wolf “trophy game area” and is in the “predator zone,” an area where wolves can be killed without permit or limit and where, at the time, there weren’t compensation programs to reimburse ranchers for their losses.
“I didn’t know what the rules were, as far as what could be done under the Wilderness Act, and what couldn’t be,” Sommers said. “So that was basically what I was asking.”
“I found out you can’t really do it, so that’s that,” Sommers said. “That conversation just died there.”
Both Sommers and Hoelscher declined to identify the ranchers whose high-elevation grazing allotment in the wilderness was center stage in the conflict.
Western Watersheds Project staffer Jonathan Ratner said that, among people in the email thread, only the Bousmans run cows in the southern Winds, grazing their herd on the Silver Creek Allotment. Joel Bousman, who’s also a Sublette County commissioner, did not return a phone call requesting an interview.
The family ranch, located a dozen miles southwest of Boulder, was permitted to run 483 cow-calf pairs and 20 bulls on the Silver Creek Allotment in 2019, according to an “annual operating instructions” memo posted on Bridger-Teton’s website.
Sommers, a stockman who deals annually with chronic grizzly bear depredation in the Upper Green River area, said that the conflict in the southern Winds abated for a time after federal trappers were able to capture some wolves from the offending packs and target the animals outside of the Bridger Wilderness.
“There was a concerted effort to trap and to find out what wolves were doing what,” he said, “and then work on them when they’re not up in the wilderness.”
Wildlife Services, a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, were able to successfully kill some offending wolves on lower-elevation seasonal ranges in late 2019 or early this year, Sommers said. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s large carnivore chief, Dan Thompson, confirmed that two wolf packs that roam the southwest slope of the Winds were knocked back.
“To our knowledge, five wolves were removed in response to that damage,” he said.
According to Wyoming’s latest annual wolf report, the Burnt Lake and Prospect wolf packs — which totaled six animals combined — roamed that area at the beginning of 2019. Since then the Burnt Lake Pack has more or less fizzled and the Scab Lake Pack has filled the void, Thompson said. The next Game and Fish wolf report, which will provide a year-end status update of wolves in the area, is due out any day.
Game and Fish pays less attention to wolves in the predator zone, an area comprising 85% of Wyoming where the species is technically under the jurisdiction of the Wyoming Department of Agriculture. Wyoming’s Wildlife Services office, the branch of the federal government that does pay closer attention, has not authorized interviews with the News&Guide as a policy.
Designated wilderness complicates the agency’s normal wolf-killing methods, because aircraft are typically banned from landing or hovering low enough to drop a person unless there are extenuating circumstances, such as a human injury or wildfire. The general prohibition makes it more difficult to capture wolves and fit them with GPS tracking collars, thus turning them into “Judas” wolves that can lead aerial gunners to a pack that strikes cattle or other livestock.
Bridger-Teton Supervisor Tricia O’Connor says there’s a “grey area” over whether wolves could be shot from a helicopter in the wilderness.
“If some authority is flying over wilderness, do we have the authority to say yes or no?” O’Connor said. “I think that’s something I would have to have lots of conversation about, if we were to go down that path.
“We would have to go through a whole analysis,” she said. “Is there another tool? Is that really a minimum tool to manage what you’re trying to manage?”
That’s a path that Sommers and others who called for the meeting didn’t want to go down.
“We haven’t pursued it more,” he said, “because we figured it was pointless.”
Using helicopters for routine wildlife management in wilderness areas has been litigated in the recent past. In 2016, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game ran flights in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness to collar elk and — without authorization — wolves. The environmental law firm Earthjustice sued, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in March 2020 that the Forest Service must allow the public to vet such wilderness flights for 30 days. The courts also determined that wildlife managers must thoroughly analyze the effects of such flights via a National Environmental Policy Act review.
“Today’s decision upholds key requirements that protect the public’s interest in maintaining the wilderness as a wild area — not a helicopter landing zone,” Earthjustice attorney Tim Preso said in a prepared statement last month.
When Wildlife Services updated its environmental assessment for its wolf-killing operations in the Equality State, the agency did leave the door open for aerially shooting wolves in wilderness areas.
But use of aircraft in wilderness areas like Bridger was deemed “unlikely,” and “would require specific case-by-case approval, or be requested by the managing agency,” in this case the Bridger-Teton National Forest, according to the 2019 assessment. Wildlife Services judged the likelihood of having to trap or kill wolves in the Bridger Wilderness within the next five years as “moderate,” meaning there was a 33% to 66% chance.
Ratner, whose FOIA request brought to light the sputtered conversation about killing wolves in a wilderness area, said he was “struck” by Bridger-Teton’s willingness to entertain the idea.
“When industry wants something, the agency sits up and gives them the attention that they want,” Ratner said. “Within days after that email, a meeting had been scheduled and numerous people did research to prepare for the meeting. But they could have just told them, ‘No, we’re not doing this, it isn’t going to work.’ ”
“When I bring a problem to them, it basically goes into the black hole and they ignore it,” he said, “whereas these guys snap a finger and they’re like, ‘Oh yes, what can I do for you?’ ”
O’Connor, the forest supervisor, said that in general Bridger-Teton tries to support partner agencies and their management goals.